text: Quantitative single-pulse nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) is a method amenable for measuring kinetic fractionation of isotopes for natural abundance KIE measurements. Pascal et al. were inspired by studies demonstrating dramatic variations of deuterium within identical compounds from different sources and hypothesized that NMR could be used to measure deuterium kinetic isotope effects at natural abundance. Pascal and coworkers tested their hypothesis by studying the insertion reaction of dimethyl diazomalonate into cyclohexane. Pascal et al. measured a KIE of 2.2 using  NMR for materials of natural abundance.
  Singleton and coworkers demonstrated the capacity of  NMR based natural abundance KIE measurements for studying the mechanism of the [4 + 2] cycloaddition of isoprene with maleic anhydride. Previous studies by Gajewski on isotopically enrich materials observed KIE results that suggested an asynchronous transition state, but were always consistent, within error, for a perfectly synchronous reaction mechanism.
  This work by Singleton et al. established the measurement of multiple  KIE's within the design of a single experiment. These  and  KIE measurements determined at natural abundance found the "inside" hydrogens of the diene experience a more pronounced  KIE than the "outside" hydrogens" and the C1 and C4 experience a significant KIE. These key observations suggest an asynchronous reaction mechanism for the cycloaddition of isoprene with maleic anhydride.
  The limitations for determining KIE's at natural abundance using NMR are that the recovered material must have a suitable amount and purity for NMR analysis (the signal of interest should be distinct from other signals), the reaction of interest must be irreversible, and the reaction mechanism must not change for the duration of the chemical reaction.
  Experimental details for using quantitative single pulse NMR to measure kinetic isotope effect at natural abundance as follows: the experiment needs to be performed under quantitative conditions including a relaxation time of 5 T measured 90° flip angle, a digital resolution of at least 5 points across a peak, and a signal:noise greater than 250. The raw FID is zero-filled to at least 256K points before the Fourier transform. NMR spectra are phased and then treated with a zeroth order baseline correction without any tilt correction. Signal integrations are determined numerically with a minimal tolerance for each integrated signal.